ANTI MADURO PROTESTS IN VENEZUELA

Protests have been taking place in Venezuela since early February. The root causes are lousy economic policies started under Chávez. I lean towards corruption, the gradual destruction of the country´s agricultural and industrial capacity, monetary policy which lead to high inflation and then hyperinflation, and the Exchange rate peg.

These are all linked in a complex dance, and tend to have positive feedbacks. Thus the destruction of internal production capacity led to the need to import more. This in turn required hard currency they got from oil exports. Chavez had plenty of money after he took over in 1999, because oil prices continued to climb (they went up about six fold from 1999 when he took over). But the government chose to keep import prices very low, and thus they fixed the currency Exchange rate to créate an extremely strong Bolívar. This in turn made local production non competetive, and thus the locals produced less, and there was more need for imports. To map out the whole process I would have to show you a dynamic model in which you can see year after year the gradual decay of the economy. This wasn´t helped by theft and corruption, and the aid Chavez was sending to Cuba and other nations to buy diplomatic cover.

But by early 2012 the economy had reached a really bad crossroads. And yet Chavez faced October 2012 elections, so they decided to borrow a lot of money (about $40 billion from China, for example), and they stopped paying their bills, or slowed down payments to get more cash in hand. So by making a huge effort at throwing money at the economy, Chavez won the election. Then he told the people the truth, he had terminal cáncer, and two months later he disappeared from view. Officially he died in March 2013. Many of us think he died months before.

Before he disappeared in December 2012 Chavez announced Maduro would replace him. Thus Maduro faced a presidential election against a very popular opposition leader, Capriles. This meant Maduro couldn´t fix the economy taking the medicine. He threw more money at the economy, it´s rumoured they even flew gold bars to China in Exchange for more loans (by then the Chinese were getting cold feet). Maduro is said to have won in April 2013, by 51 to 49 %. The opposition asked for a full audit, including the voter registers because it was suspected Maduro got the vote total rigged by having dead people vote (in Venezuela the process to remove a dead person from the voter rolls is very complex).

Thus when Maduro "runs" the government from December 2012 to April 2013 throwing money and using chewing gum and bailing wire to try to get popular. Then he takes over and starts a series of really stupid moves. For example he had shut off the secondary Exchange market, SITME, and failed to provide a vehicle for businesses to get dollars to import food, medicine, spares, components, etc. As the hard currency dried up the businesses started cutting back production (for example Toyota, General motors, paper mills, bottlers, the few food packagers left). Maduro is an ex bus driver, and he seems to get conflicting advice. So inflation shot up as the shortages increased, the Price controls being ineffective to curtail inflation, but having a perverse effect by causing scarcity.

But things were going bad to worse when Maduro, facing municipal elections he wanted to have chavistas win, ordered the takeover of stores to force sales at low prices. Many of these stores were actually run by chavistas or people linked to chavistas, but by then Maduro was desperate. In some cases people didn´t wait for the army to take over the stores, so they got looted. By early december the bulk of store and warehouses were nearly empty. But the chavista mass was happy with the cheap junk they got. And thus Maduro´s party got to win a majority of the popular vote. BUT the reds lost all the major cities, except for the Libertador disctrict in Caracas (Caracas has five metropolitan districts, each has a mayor and its own police force, etc).

 And this left the country in a funny situation, with opposition mayors controling all the major cities, the government controlled all the media, and started cutting off print to newspapers, and threatened journalists if there was any reporting which went contrary to their line. They also control the army, the national guard, the courts, most police forces, secret police, and have tens of thousands of Cubans embedded in Venezuela, which function as anything from medical personnel to supervisors in notaries, as well as control the issue of government issue ID cards and Passports. And it is said they have people embedded in the military control structure and quite a few Cubans in the secret police (I can´t confirm this but we do notice the type of Spanish used by government officials has changed and includes many Cuban terms and sentence construction as if they had spent a lot of time with Cubans).

But all of this would have left people incredibly pissed off but not doing much, until there was a small spark in San Cristóbal in Tachira. San Cristóbal has an opposition mayor. The opposition got 70 % of the vote in that particular region during the presidential election. Why? because it´s close to the Colombian border. People there, and I mean everybody, has been gaining from cross border smuggling. They take a bag of flour sold for $1 equivalent in Venezuela, and go over the border into Colombia and sell it to a Colombian wholesaler for $10. The government started cutting off the flow of food, medicine and fuels to the region around San Cristóbal. This caused hunger and a lot of anger. And the angry people included everybody in those towns.

So the stage was set. In Early February there was an atempted rape on campus in San Cristóbal. The girl managed to escape, but the student organization started a protest asking for more cops on campus. It was as simple as that. The National Guard commander was a chavista thug. He knew that town was opposition, and he responded with brute force. There were quite a few people beaten on camera, and six students were arrested.

These guys in San Cristóbal are tough. They are the Venezuelan version of the West Texans. People who have their own culture (they are isolated from Caracas and other cities by the Andes or by jungle like áreas full of FARC and thieves). So the protests escalated and it got really nasty.

The student movement in Caracas had planned a protest on February 12th, the Day of the Student in Venezuela. But given the arrests and repression in San Cristóbal they added a move to deliver a demand to the Interior Minister to reléase the prisoners taken in that town. The protest went to the Interior Ministry. It was massive because Leopoldo Lopez, an opposition leader asked for the people to protest that day and ask for the release of the prisoners and for the government to fix the street crime and lack of food.

AFTER the main protest had dissolved, around 2 PM, a large group of students was walking home in a low middle class área called La Candelaria when they found their way barred by National Guard. Gradually they were all herded in a small sector. All the exits were blocked by National GUardsmen. And these guardsmen allowed a group of shooters (which later was confirmed by the government were secret police agents) to enter the streets where the students were wandering around looking for a way out. The shooting started and they killed one student right on camera.

 They wounded a few more, and also killed a communist leader called Juan Montoya.I think the purpose of the ambush and the shooting was to kill Juan Montoya, known as a collective leader and also known as Commander Muchachi, leader of the Comandos Carapaica. This guy had already expressed his disapproval of the ongoing corruption. So I suspect Maduro had him killed. Maduro needs to make moves, and a heavily armed bunch of communists running around inside Caracas cant be allowed. So he decapitated that organization.

But the killing of THE STUDENT got people pissed off (I think that shooting was a cover, they had to kill at least one more person, that student was shot very neatly with a single bullet in the back of the head). Thus the protests increased. And the government started a wave of repression by unleashing the National Guard, but even worse, they unleashed the Colectivos. These colectivos are like Hitler´s Brown shirts. They are civilians, armed by Chavez with weapons ranging from 9 mm automatics to fully automatic assault rifles (the Carapaica commandos even displayed a rocket launcher in one of their videos).

The human rights abuses are a mix of actions, about one third are national guard and police. About two thirds are Brown shirts or biker gangs. The government calls for the Brown shirts to act (this includes a call by Maduro on national TV three days ago to "put out the flame" by the "organizations and collectives"). The Venezuelan people also understand Maduro is a puppet and the repression is ordered by Raul Castro. This elevates the anger, and even chavistas hate the idea that Venezuelan may be turning into a Cuban colony.

Thus things have escalated. The wave of terror is bad. People are holed up in their houses, and now the Brown shirts are going inside and dragging people out. There people are taken away and nobody knows for sure how many or where they are taken. 

Opposition leaders have been arrested using trumped up or unlawful charges, and the government-controlled "Supreme Court" has announced there´s no need to have Chavista electoral authorities, Supreme Court members, nor the National Controller be in their posts with National Assembly approval (the opposition has sufficient members in the National Assembly to influence votes on approval of some senior government positions such as Supreme Court Justices, so the move amounts to a suspension of Constitutional rights). 

Venezuelans are for the most part a mild mannered people. Venezuelans are just shooting videos of people getting dragged and then they cry and make phone calls and get interviewed by foreign correspondents who do manage to get through. When I consider what I saw in Cuba when I was young, this is still a D movie. Santa Clara, where I lived when we overthrew Batista was a C. Aleppo or Baghdad when the US invaded are a B. Dresden and Guernica are an A.

So it can get worse. But I don´t think it will. I see the current terror wave as a means to impose Maduro´s will (and therefore the Cuban´s will) on the population. This will lead to a mass exodus. THus the whole thing may have been planned and encouraged. Maybe this is just a slight variation of an  ethnic cleansing campaign,  we could call it a sociopolitical  cleansing campaign.